It is a shameful, shameful, despicable hour in the history of the American presidency
It’s one thing to learn from the dry reportage of the daily news that Trump is a work-shy and worthless incompetent who wastes the better part of his day on Twitter and golf, it’s another thing to experience it in real-time. I’m five hours ahead of Washington so his Twitter feed flashes across my screen constantly, from the wee hours of the morning when I get up at 4:30 am (yes, I’m one of those), until it stops around 7am my time for about five hours for sleep and resumes at noon, and on and on until I get to bed around 10pm.
The tweeting is relentless. His tweets are full of spiteful excoriations of people he hates, white grievance and racial divisiveness. They are quotidian tweets of petty, humorless, self-indulgence. Nowhere in them is a human being to be found. It’s like reading the complaints of a not-very-bright, socially underdeveloped teenager. It’s not so much that some of them are unworthy of the president of the United States — they all are. Reading Trump’s tweets reminds me of a familiar illusion, that we’re living in the middle of a “B” movie comedy where a famous person or leader gets temporarily and accidentally replaced by a moron. It’s “The Prince and the Pauper” meets “The 3 Stooges.”
Then there’s his son, the chinless dauphin of a twit they so aptly named “Donald Trump Jr,” who wrote a whole book on how the Left allegedly practices “victimhood.” His tweets are full of — you guessed it — victimhood. Here’s an example of a random, recent Junior retweet:
Literally the only reason media came out so hard against this [hydroxychloroquine] had nothing to do with medicine or science. It was simply because Trump talked about it. Just amazing.
Trump junior is clearly his father’s son. I’ve never seen a more pathetic family of whiners.
But it’s not so much what Donald Trump says, it’s what he doesn’t say. He never mentions with any sympathy the 131,503 dead American coronavirus victims (as I write this). Nor does he have any words of comfort for the families of American soldiers who were murdered in Afghanistan by Taliban thugs hired by Vladimir Putin. Instead he blames the “lamestream media” for making “fake news” about it. In the end everything is about him, even the deaths of over a hundred thousand people is all about him and about how it makes him look bad. Anything beyond that is irrelevant.
The notorious story coming out of both American and British intelligence, that Putin is paying Afghani assassins to murder American troops, is important to Donald Trump only to the extent he can find plausible deniability, that he can somehow establish that it’s not his fault. As long as it’s not his fault that’s as far as he goes with it. Digging into it further or getting on the phone to Putin and demanding that it stops doesn’t occur to him. It’s as if he thinks being president of the United States is somebody else’s job. Steve Schmidt said it best when he said, “It is a shameful, shameful, despicable hour in the history of the American presidency.”
And here I am writing about Donald Trump and his endless tweets and he hasn’t tweeted once. Is it the exception to prove the rule? Not at all. Jeff Tiedrich just tweeted an explanation: “The lazy fuck is golfing right now. Instead of reading his daily brief.” And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.